Your inbox for the web

Posted by Nicholas Baum, Product Manager, Google Reader

Do you ever wish that finding interesting stuff on the web was as easy as watching TV? Some nights, I just want to relax, tune in to HBO and see what's on. Other times, I know exactly what I want to watch: all those Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes that I've recorded, for one thing. But on the web, the only way to "tune in" is to go to the websites themselves and see what's there. What I really want is for the websites to come to me instead, so I can read them when I feel like it.

Enter Google Reader. Today there's a new version that makes it even easier to keep track of your favorite websites. Think of Google Reader as your inbox for the web. When you check your email, you don't go to each of your friends' mailboxes to see if they sent you anything — you just check your inbox. Google Reader does the same thing for the Internet, by putting all the sites that interest you in one convenient location and indicating when something has been updated. Here's a quick video intro for you:



We've also made sharing a lot more fun. Everyone who uses Google Reader now gets their own public page to which they can post items of interest. Kind of like a blog with training wheels — it creates a whole stream of your favorites on a page your friends and family can see or even subscribe to. This is definitely my favorite feature — I use it all the time to share pictures from my favorite photoblogs with my friends and family.

So go ahead and try it out. If you're already a regular, we hope you'll like the new look. If you've never used Google Reader before, we invite you to discover a brand new way to keep track of the sites that interest you. We still have a lot of features we want to experiment with, so it's in Google Labs for the time being. And keep up to date with the latest developments via our Reader blog... in Google Reader, of course!